Did the Byzantine Church Cease to be the Church During Iconoclasm?

Archpriest Peter Perekrestov found the draft of this letter. St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco wrote it on September 25, in 1963.

From Editor

When I came to Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville in 1990, I was shocked that the locals there would call us students from Russia “Soviets.” In this letter, St. John touches on the term “the Soviet Church,” used during the Cold War by professors of Holy Trinity Seminary like Archbishop Averky, Archimandrite Constantine (Zaitsev), and Ivan M. Andreev. Rusʹ was under the Mongol yoke for over two hundred years; the tiny principality of Moscow was a direct beneficiary of Mongol rule. However, surely none of the people who labeled us “Soviets” would argue that Muscovites should have been called Mongols…

Protodeacon Andrei Psarev,

September 24, 2025

If someone began to talk in Metropolitan Anthony’s  [First Hierarch of the ROCOR, Khrapovitskii] presence about “wrong actions by the Church,” he would stop them, pointing out that the actions of the hierarchy cannot be attributed to the Church, since the hierarchy is not the whole Church, even though it speaks on its behalf. On the See of Constantinople, [there sat] Paul the Confessor, Makedonios,